What do we need for a Proletariat Revolution.

[Einkarl]

How?

where?

who?

why?

when?

Also, can I get some pros and cons for Pan-leftism?

[StalinFanboy]

Anyone who tells you they know the answers to these questions is lying to you, and probably lying to themselves.

[Let's Get Free]

I can't give you all the "ingredients" for a proletarian revolution. But a society in perfect equilibrium might be defined as a society in which every member had at a given moment all that he or she could possibly desire and was in a state of absolute contentment. Or it could be defined as a society similar to that of social insects like bees or ants, where most members respond predictably to a given stimuli.

Of course, any human society can be in but an imperfect equilibrium, a condition in which varying and conflicting interests of individuals or groups of individuals are in complex adjustment, an adjustment so complex that no treatment within the existing system seems possible. As new desires arise, or as environmental conditions change, and as institutions fail to change along with them, a disequilibrium is a result, and what we call a revolution breaks out. Such was the American Revolution of 1776; the French Revolution of 1789-93; the revolutionary movements in Europe in 1848; the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; the Spanish Revolution of 1931-37; and more recently, the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions.

[jookyle]

First, you need to have the masses realize, not accept but realize, they are indeed the proletariat. Not some happy middle class person who thinks with hard work they too can be the CEO of Goldman Sachs and be a big 1%er investor. From that, if we want a socialist revolution, all we can do is guide them to come to the same conclusions themselves. You can't force them to learn, just do everything you can to assist their growth. Before revolution takes place in a place like America, in what ever form it may be, numbers are going to be needed. A lot of numbers.

You are a person and, you need people for a revolution. One person is not a revolution. One person needs to find another one person, and then another and another. So they can be people, and act as a people. And then that people meets other people and they make an even bigger people. And soon, there's enough people for a revolution.

[Aussie Trotskyist]

Lenin said that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation, but at the same time, not all revolutionary situations lead to a revolution.

Furthermore, someone (Trotsky?) Said that the revolution cannot be planned.

While I'm not an expert on the recent happenings in Greece and Spain, i dare say they are in (or approaching) revolutionary situations. The people are protesting (sometimes violently), prompting police retaliation, the Greek fascists have apparently been gaining support from the state, their economies are screwed, and the austerity measures have forced the masses into horrid living conditions.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

How?

where?

who?

why?

when?

Also, can I get some pros and cons for Pan-leftism?


How? Guns

Where? Nation capital, Bourgeois Parliament

Who? Workers versus Bourgeois State

Why? Das Kapital

When? When a Marxist party has a majority

[Ostrinski]

Class consciousness. How we achieve that is where the different leftist tendencies differ.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Large numbers of workers have to be organized and consious: in other words there has to be a widespread sense of what working class interests are and the idea that workers themselves can run society on that basis. Of course workers will not get a sense of their own power (nor will other parts of society) if there is no experience in class struggle, so people have to see in action that workers can organize themselves and win strikes and be a leading force in society who can potentially shut-down and then run cities themselves. This can happen pretty quickly in struggle, but takes a lot of experience and trial and error experienced by workers themselves to get to that point.

But there can be a mass revolutionary sentiment and no revolution, so in addition to our own subjective organization as a class there also needs to be a larger social conflict or crisis of some kind. This doesn't always mean war or economic crisis, sometimes advancing working class struggle can provoke a dynamic that leads to crisis at the top of society like in Paris 68. But essentially on top of our class being prepared and able to coordinate their own rise to power over the capitalists, there needs to be some condition where the hegemony of and popular confidence in the system and it's managers is broken. This prompts the question: "well if this doesn't work, if these guys can't lead, who should" across all of society, allowing workers to push for their own rule and win other classes into supporting worker's power and socialist organization of society over the chaos and misary of capitalist rule.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

A mass working class revolutionary movement with the will to act in its interests as a class. Nothing can substitute for that.

[xvzc]

I don't think that the revolution will come about as the result of a single insurrectionary action, but that it's a steady and protracted process of several military and political victories which fits into an overall strategic plan for seizing political and state power for the proletariat, of gradually accumulating those forces with advanced consciousness into the vanguard and building up a new power next to that of the old one.

This process necessitates a full break with bourgeois legality, i.e., an active boycott of the bourgeois state, its rules, its political parties and its electoral system -- the system of bourgeois rule which orients the existence of the proletariat. Instead, the proletariat needs to exert its existence as an economic and social class outside of the framework of bourgeois legality, through extra-parliamentary means, on the streets and, lastly, through armed struggle.

In sum, Protracted People's War.